To Have, to Hold, For a While

Amid divorce, remarriage and co-habitation, children do not do well.

By

W. Bradford Wilcox

Updated April 13, 2009 12:01 a.m. ET

Last week, Vermont became the fourth state to legalize same-sex marriage, setting off yet another round of celebration and hand-wringing in different quarters of American life. The debate over same-sex marriage -- showing so much intensity on both sides -- is but one sign that Americans take marriage very seriously indeed. From television specials featuring over-the-top Bridezilla weddings to the federal Healthy Marriage Initiative, which spends $150 million annually on marriage-related programs, no other Western nation devotes as much cultural energy, public policy or religious attention to matrimony as the U.S. And with approximately 90% of Americans marrying over the course of their lifetimes, the U.S. has the highest marriage rate of any Western country.

ENLARGE

But there is a darker side to this exceptionalism, as Andrew J. Cherlin notes in "The Marriage-Go-Round," his incisive portrait of marriage in America. Virtually no other nation in the West compares with the U.S. when it comes to divorce, short-term co-habitation and single parenthood. As Mr. Cherlin documents, Americans marry and co-habit at younger ages, divorce more quickly and enter into second marriages or co-habiting unions faster than their counterparts elsewhere. In other words, Americans "step on and off the carousel of intimate relationships."

The biggest problem with this aspect of American family life is that children often do not do well when parents and partners are whirling in and out of their lives. Children have difficulty adapting to changes in their routines or to step- parents who are not comfortable acting as authority figures or to nonresidential parents who see children only intermittently. The live-in boyfriend, who may well not have a child's best interests at heart, is an even greater problem. Such a mix of hybrid forms, according to Mr. Cherlin, is part of the reason that family instability is linked to higher rates of teen sex, teen pregnancy, teen drunkenness, truancy and behavioral problems in school.

By contrast, Mr. Cherlin writes, "stable, low-conflict families with two biological or adoptive parents provide better environments for children, on average, than do other living arrangements." Unfortunately, the family changes of the past half-century have left millions of American children vulnerable to one or more dizzying spins on the family merry-go-round.

The Marriage-Go-Round By Andrew J. Cherlin (Knopf, 271 pages, $25.95)

Family instability, Mr. Cherlin shows, has been increasingly concentrated in poor and working-class households in recent years. Divorce is much more common in less-educated circles: 23% of women with only a high-school degree will divorce or separate within five years of marriage, compared with 13% of women who hold a college degree. Thus children at the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder are now much more likely to be doubly disadvantaged by poverty and family instability.

How did the U.S. reach this state of affairs -- in which marriage is almost universally desired and yet more fragile than ever before, with almost half of all first marriages ending in divorce court and a series of hybrid family forms adding confusion and instability to children's lives? Mr. Cherlin points to competing "models" or ideas of marriage. On the one hand, he notes, most Americans believe that marriage is the best social institution for bearing and rearing children and that marriage should be grounded in a permanent, faithful and loving relationship. On the other hand, Americans celebrate individualism more than people in other Western societies and so believe that they are entitled to make choices that maximize their personal happiness. When a marriage becomes unsatisfying, difficult or burdensome, according to this model, it can be dissolved -- it even should be dissolved.

Such contradictory impulses push the vast majority of Americans into marriage and then push a large minority out again when their dreams of marital bliss go unrealized. It does not help that Americans in recent years have come to see marriage as a symbol more than a covenant -- as a kind of "capstone" signaling that they have arrived at a certain position in the world, with a good job, a good r&eacute;sum&eacute; and now, it is hoped, a soulmate who will make them happy. Meanwhile, poor and working-class adults -- especially men -- lack the cushioning financial assets of their privileged counterparts, so they are even less likely to get married or stay married.

Because Mr. Cherlin is reluctant to challenge the individualistic ethos of our day, the strongest advice he can muster -- when he steps back to consider the marriage portrait he has drawn so brilliantly -- is that Americans who aspire to be parents should "slow down" when they are entering or exiting a marriage or a co-habiting relationship, bearing in mind that children do best in a stable home. It is not bad advice, certainly. But some of us may wish to do more than put a yellow light in the path of parents who are tempted to hop onto (and off of) America's family merry-go-round. For the sake of the children, a red light may be better.

Mr. Wilcox, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, is a senior fellow at the Institute for American Values.

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